Installation Overview

Milvus runs on machines with or without GPU. To use Milvus on machines without a GPU, install CPU-only Milvus. Otherwise, it is recommended to use GPU-enabled Milvus to achieve better search performance for larger queries.

In Milvus, the vector search includes 2 separate processes: index building and search. For GPU-enabled Milvus, these two processes can run concurrently, which facilitate more efficient query, especially for incremental data. While for CPU-only Milvus, search computation can only be executed after index building is completed, which makes it more suitable for static data.

Install using Docker

Transfer Docker image and configuration files offline

If you cannot use your host to acquire Docker images and configuration files online because of network restrictions, please acquire them online with another available host and transfer the files offline. Refer to installation steps to learn how to acquire a Docker image. The following steps use milvusdb/milvus as the Docker image tag.

Transfer Docker image offline

Save the Docker image to a tar file and use appropriate methods to transfer the tar file.

$ docker save milvusdb/milvus > milvus_image.tar

After transferring the tar file, use the following command to load the tar file to a Docker image.

$ docker load < milvus_image.tar

Transfer configuration files offline

You can download configuration files and use appropriate methods to transfer the configuration files. Refer to installation steps for details.